Page 22 of The Duke is Wicked

From everything this League of Lords had said or done so far, it was clear they were going to help her when she’d sought to deceive them. She felt foolish and cornered, shamed, and frankly, fearful. So she childishly struck out. “When is the first timeevergood?”

The impervious duke Kitty Hazelton considered stuffy and unapproachable, the handsome man sitting at the head of his enormous table in his equally enormous castle, didn’t do what Delaney expected. What his friends, from their startled reaction, expected. Instead of snubbing her vulgarity, he burst into laughter, choking on his tea.

She leaned in and gave him a solid pop between his shoulder blades while whispering, “Down boy,” in his ear. Then she reached for an apple, shined it on her sleeve and took a resolute bite, in the event he believed he’d gotten the best of her.

Her brother groaned from somewhere down the table, a man well aware of her stunts—and her stubbornness.

“Did Fireball just laugh?” Humphrey jammed his finger in his ear and wiggled it. “That’s a sound I’ve heard maybetwicein ten years. Color me dumbfounded. He has a sense of humor buried beneath the armor.”

“He laughs, just not as much as Finn or…” Piper waffled, highlighting the fact that she was the diplomat in the group. A mystical healer, of mind, not body. This made sense.

“Oh, sweetheart, he’s laughed at least three times,” Julian added in a loving whisper that everyone nonetheless heard.

“Fireball.” Delaney crunched the apple to bits between her teeth. “Nearly as good as Kitty.”

“No,” Ashcroft said around a strangled exhalation, still working the tea from his lungs. “Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.”

“Is that a warning, Your Grace?” She took a juicy bite. “I adore those.”

He cracked his teacup to the table. “Warning? It’s apromise.”

“We’ll talk after I best you. Our competition, remember? I think I’ll add the use of Fireball, spoken at my leisure, to the wager of who wins your three-quarters-of-a-mile trek through the woodlands, two jumps included.” She chomped into the apple with a taunting nibble. “Unless you got a gander at my bay and realized you couldn’t possibly beat me.”

The duke rotated his teacup in a tight circle and stared at the ceiling like a vital message was written there. “Gander? Is that a quaint southern way of asking if I examined your mount? I did better than that. I rode her. Just this morning. She’s quite…fine.” When they met hers, his amber gaze was sensual and forbidding, emotions she was afraid to interpret. Pressing her back into the chair’s rungs, she held Sebastian’s regard, knowing she was challenging him to more than a race.

The silence registered, so peaceful it was creating its own clamor.

Delaney noted two items of interest as her gaze left him to circle the room.

One, the guests at the Duke of Ashcroft’s breakfast were looking at the two of them as they would performers in a traveling circus, curiously entertained and slightly incredulous. Maybe they’d never seen the duke, a former soldier with a stalwart demeanor jest or tease. Although, if their smiles meant anything, they wereenjoyingseeing it.

Two, her brother was gazing at Kitty, who sat to his extreme right, with a wistful expression Delaney hoped to God wasnothinglike Darcy’s when he first gazed upon Elizabeth.

“Heartache lies down that path,” Sebastian whispered in her ear. “An earl’s daughter and a Terrible Two? Not going to happen. Not in this country, not in this century.”

Fixing an arctic cast to her features, Delaney turned to him. “What babble are you spouting, Tremont?”

“Decided to dump the ‘your grace’, did you? Don’t blame you. I find it insufferable, so I certainly can’t expect an American to give it credence. All for one, one for all in the colonies, isn’t it? No kings, no princes. Not a bloody title in sight.”

Kitty’s trilling snatch of a laugh swept over them, followed by her brother’s rumbling chuckle, the blend a flawless interpretation of youth and merriment. More lyrical than one of the duke’s violin compositions. Delaney twisted her napkin into a knot. She was five minutes younger than Case but a hundred years older. “If you were doing a better job courting,Your Grace, providing even half of the frivolities a young girl wants, Kitty wouldn’t be giggling with another man or taking such delight in a peculiar woman giving her a nickname.” Her voice had dropped until only he could hear her, a soft rebuke. “You’re good at one piece but not the other.”

He took a sip of tea, his eyebrows shooting over the rim of the cup. “Am I? Do tell. What am I missing on the wooing front? Or better yet, let’s discuss the part I’m good at.”

Delaney pushed her eggs around her plate, dodging his wicked half-smile. Dodging the intense urge to sweep his hair from his brow and give it a neat tuck behind his ear. With his overlong tresses and hooded amber eyes, full lips, the shallow dent in his cheek, not deep enough to call a dimple but there, he looked like a poet, not a soldier. Though she didn’t doubt for one moment that he had it in him to fight. “You know the part you’re good at. It’s splashed across the gossip rags much like sunlight is splashed across our feet.” She stabbed her fork in a piece of sausage. “It’s not helpful, this expertise, as you can’t share it with the girl. Not yet. You’re left to prop yourself up with charm, which I fear you lack.”

Sebastian set his teacup aside and leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking with the movement. “I think we should change the subject, Temple. I haven’t shared my expertise in close to a year, and something about the hint of lemon clinging to your skin is beginning to trouble me.”

She turned to him with a smirk that felt shaky at the edges. “Exactly,Tremont.” Delaney tapped her fork against his cuff, her trembling contained to her knees, not her fingers. “Tell Kitty she smells heavenly. That her eyes sparkle. That her voice sounds like the call of, oh, I don’t know, some lovely English bird. I assume you had to do none of this with the opera singer.”

Sebastian leaned in, bracing his elbows on the table and linking his fingers, his patience trickling away. “I want to know what you’re hiding, and I want to know itnow.”

Delaney swallowed, placing her fork by her plate. If he thought she was going to give in that easily… “If you win the race, you get two questions. Wasn’t that the wager?”

Eyes downcast, she heard rather than witnessed him yank his hand through his hair. That was a sensual image she wasn’t strong enough to take in and remain unaffected. Not with the man sitting so close, looking so perplexed. Soconcerned. Concern for her. When no one, except her twin, had given a fig about her since her father’s passing three years ago.

She was used to taking care of herself.

“We’re just playing a game, Temple. I can’t say why I’m cooperating. I only see that I am. And you, we know why. You’re desperate. But it can only go on for so long, this dancing around the truth. I have people in the supernatural world I find myself in who depend on me. People I’d protect, and have, with mylife. Who would do the same for my children. You’ve stepped in, a threat and someone in need, all in one troublesome bundle. When I tell you I will find out what you’re hiding, I want you to understand the end result isknown.”